“CIRKLON3 [ Колхозная mix ]”

It’s been 17 years since Aphex Twin has released a music video and about a year since he’s released new music. He’s emerged from his cave with a “CIRKLON3 [ Колхозная mix ],” complete with a music video from an Irish 12-year-old named Ryan Wyer, who’s been crafting wonderfully weird and homemade Aphex Twin music videos for two years.

“CIRKLON3 [ Колхозная mix ]” is classic Aphex, a snarky and beautiful electronic meditation built from vintage sounds. It's buoyant, bubbly, and fluid, with repetitions that recall arcade games, side-scrolling, and all the fun of being young somehow. It isn’t always apparent when listening to Aphex Twin, but deep inside the postmodern ennui and irony of his music, there is an eternally youthful feeling, or at least one that is naughty and childish.

Wyer’s video depicts grainy images of preteens in Aphex Twin T-shirts dancing in different locales, and Richard D. James’ famous smug grin replacing their own faces. It’s unsettling and hilarious. Wyer’s videos speak to a whimsical avant-garde art-making that only children are capable of, and this quality elevates the song in such a powerful way. It’s cool, to say the least, that in a song that is already so young in sound, Aphex Twin embraces another generation, handing them the camera to tell the story.